Structural distortion of biogenic aragonite in strongly textured mollusc shell layers

The stabilisation of strong textures in mollusc shells has for long been a strong drawback towards precise structural determinations of these natural biocomposites. We demonstrate here on several crossed lamellar and nacre layers from two gastropods (Charonia lampas lampas and Haliotis tuberculata tuberculata) and one bivalve (Pinctada maxima), that on real specimens (without grinding or specific preparation), the textural information can be used efficiently for precise structural determination of the biogenic aragonite. This is done through the combination of orientation distribution function and cyclic Rietveld refinements on several hundreds to thousands of diffractions diagrams.